Dr. Claus Volko

In 2017, I have bought a lot of books. This is only an excerpt from the complete list: 1. Turings Kathedrale (George Dyson, 2012). Original title: Turing's Cathedral. A book about computers, especially about the early days when people such as Alan Turing and John Von Neumann were still alive. Status: not finished reading yet. I have started reading it again and again several times because I wanted to memorize more details. I have not got close to even 50% of the text yet. 2. Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell, 2008). A very good book. Status: not finished reading yet. I have read only the first couple of chapters. I wrote about them in my blog a couple of weeks ago. I have not arrived closer to the end of the text yet. 3. Der soziale Schwan (Florian Willet, 2013). A German book that tries to make a synthesis of Darwinism, Economics, Social Sciences, etc. Very original ideas. Too bad the style is quite amateurish. Status: not finished reading yet. So far, I have read about 20% of the

I just remembered it was about the end of 1997, when I was 14 years old, that I started hanging out on demoscene IRC channels. So it is my personal 20 year anniversary now. I have definitely been involved in the demoscene. It is not justified if somebody says I have no demoscene connections. In April 1998, I won an x86 Assembler size coding contest organized by a demoscene magazine. My own diskmag has focused on the demoscene since issue 11, from June 1998. Since 2008, I have participated in several demoscene competitions with my 256b intros and gamedev projects. So I have actually made more than only the diskmag. I think this is enough for me to be called a demoscener. Of course, more is yet to come. I am going to participate in the Demobit 2018 competitions with a photo and a 256 byte intro. If you happen to live close enough to Bratislava and have free time in the beginning of February, I highly recommend that you come to the party! I have already been there in 2017 and enjoyed it

This article is a follow-up to my essay "The Universe as Automaton", which I published in WIN ONE, issue 11, from 2013. There, I developed the idea that the state of the universe might be modeled as a three-dimensional matrix and that the entire history of the universe could be represented as a state machine (automaton). In this article I also wrote: "It is not possible to have something that is as large as the entire universe represented by a computer - except, maybe, if it has enough redundancy that a suitable data compression algorithm could be applied." This is what I would like to investigate further now. Can a state of the universe be stored on a computer harddrive? What obstacles are connected with this endeavour? As a computer is part of the universe, it is obvious that the state of the universe can be stored on its harddrive only if we use some sort of encoding that acts as a data compressor. After all, the file that stores the state of the universe must

Meine Gruppe hat im vergangenen Jahr diese Publikation herausgebracht, über den Zusammenhang zwischen Veränderungen in der steroidalen Hormonkaskade und seelischen Erkrankungen. Jetzt möchten wir weiter daran arbeiten und suchen jemanden, der eine Anstellung an einer österreichischen oder deutschen Universität hat. Es bestünde die Möglichkeit, ein Forschungsstipendium für die Zusammenarbeit mit einem Team in Indien zu bekommen. Bitte meldet euch rasch, denn es ist nur mehr bis 30. November 2017 Zeit , das Projekt einzureichen! Horm Mol Biol Clin Investig. 2016 Mar;25(3):157-70. doi: 10.1515/hmbci-2015-0038. Model approach for stress induced steroidal hormone cascade changes in severe mental diseases.  Volko CD, Regidor PA, Rohr UD.  Abstract  INTRODUCTION:  Stress was described by Cushing and Selye as an adaptation to a foreign stressor by the anterior pituitary increasing ACTH, which stimulates the release of glucocorticoid and mineralocorticoid hormones. The question is

Today, I have had an ingenious idea that has helped me a lot find out what I am really striving for. Here is the result of this idea: This image shows the three branches of creative activity humans perform: Engineering, Art and Science. There are, of course, many other things human beings do (e.g. healthcare, politics, military,...), but those things are not creative. Being creative does not mean that you have to draw a painting that looks good or compose music. That is only one branch of creativity - Art, where aesthetics matter. But Science and Engineering are fields of creative activity, too. So you can actually be creative - create something - without having an aesthetic intuition, e.g. by writing a scientific paper or working out a mathematical proof, or by creating a mechanism or building a machine that works. Engineering is the Generation of Working Things. That means, what matters is that the result works. The difference to Science, which is the Generation of Knowledge

I purchased this book out of curiosity, and after reading the first couple of chapters I can conclude it has been worth it. It is of high relevance to my own life. In the introduction, Gladwell talks about an American town of Italian immigrants with a far lower rate of heart diseases than anywhere else in the country. The physicians who studied these phenomena came to the conclusion that this was neither due to genetics nor to nutrition, but due to the community (and, as Uwe Rohr and I would say, due to the lack of stress these people experienced in their lives, in spite of working hard). This made this town an outlier. In the first chapter, Gladwell explains why people born in particular months have an advantage in being selected by (sports) talents scouts: if they were born short after the cut-off date, they are more mature and developed than their peers, and so they are considered more talented. This has the effect that many young people who are actually equally talented genetic

As I have been talking about it to a fellow Doctor of Medicine, I would like to point out that my most important scientific publication so far, "Model approach for stress induced steroidal hormone cascade changes in severe mental diseases", can be accessed free of charge here . The publication has not gained the attention it deserves yet. Basically it proposes a model how changes to the steroidal hormone cascade might be the cause or at least a symptom of several mental illness. What this publication does not mention is that we have found out that applying high doses of isoflavones alters the steroidal hormone cascade, which has a beneficial effect in severe mental illness. Direct link to the PDF file